Interactive design of animated plushies

Abstract

We present a computational approach to creating animated plushies, soft robotic plush toys specifically-designed to reenact user-authored motions. Our design process is inspired by muscular hydrostat structures, which drive highly versatile motions in many biological systems. We begin by instrumenting simulated plush toys with a large number of small, independently-actuated, virtual muscle-fibers. Through an intuitive posing interface, users then begin animating their plushie. A novel numerical solver, reminiscent of inverse-kinematics, computes optimal contractions for each muscle-fiber such that the soft body of the plushie deforms to best match user input. By analyzing the co-activation patterns of the fibers that contribute most to the plushie's motions, our design system generates physically-realizable winch-tendon networks. Winch-tendon networks model the motorized cable-driven actuation mechanisms that drive the motions of our real-life plush toy prototypes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our computational approach by co-designing motions and actuation systems for a variety of physically-simulated and fabricated plushies.

Expanding Foam as the Material for Fabrication, Prototyping and Experimental Assessment of Low-Cost Soft Robots With Embedded Sensing

“…Similarly, we might also allow for a more interactive placement of tendon routing points or provide a set of suggestions from which the user can choose a preferred tendon layout for transmission. Numerical simulation tools, such as finite element methods, can be used to describe the micro and macroscopic deformation behaviour of foam-bodied soft robots [31], [32]. We plan to use such simulations in future work to inform and improve our soft robot design process.…”

Computational Design of Skinned Quad-Robots

“…Skouras et al [15] optimized the internal material distribution so that the resulting character exhibits the desired deformation behavior. Focusing on actuation, Bern et al [27] computed the layout of winch-tendon networks to animate plush toys, and Ma et al [28] optimized the chamber structure and material distribution for designing soft pneumatic objects.…”

Computational design of fabric formwork

“…Generally, our work falls in the category of research trying to obtain optimized structures that assume designed shapes under force equilibrium. Several works in computer graphics have considered this class of problem, including Kirchhoff-Plateau surfaces [Pérez et al 2017], thermal-formed models [Schüller et al 2016], clothing [Bartle et al 2016;Umetani et al 2011], and plush toys [Bern et al 2017;Mori and Igarashi 2007] all aim at forming given 3D surfaces by assembled flat panels. In particular, Pérez et al [2017] developed an approach to compute an optimized rod network on pre-stretched fabric, which is a similar 2D layout computation problem.…”